The present disclosure relates to financial transactions, and more particularly, to processing financial transactions and related systems and computer program products.
Financial transactions relating to purchasing goods and services are often paid for using credit and/or debit accounts that an account owner (also the customer/purchaser) accesses using associated credit and/or debit cards. The account owner may also be referred to as a cardholder. Financial transaction processing systems may provide authentication and/or verification processes that allow merchants to verify that account information is valid and that the account owner has sufficient credit/debit funds to cover the purchase.
When a customer (also referred to as a purchaser) is located at the merchant's facility (e.g., a “brick and mortar” store) for a card present or CP transaction, the merchant may be responsible for authenticating that the customer is the account owner, for example, by comparing the customer's signature to a existing signature on the physical card, examining a picture ID of the customer, and/or requiring a customer's password to complete the transaction.
For electronic commerce (“e-commerce”) transactions when a consumer shops on-line (e.g., using a merchant's website) or using other remote access (e.g., via telephone), also known as card-not-present or CNP transactions, the consumer typically provides the on-line (or otherwise remote) merchant with a credit (or debit) card number, credit card validation (CCV) number, billing address, and/or other PII (personally identifiable information).
Several alternatives (beyond encryption of the transaction) have been proposed to make online/CNP transactions more secure. For example, the credit card verification (CCV) number (a 3 or 4 digit identification number on the back of the credit card) is not stored by merchants and is used by the consumer to “demonstrate” that he/she owns (or at least is in possession of) the physical card. Alternatively, PayPal provides a 3rd party solution in which a third party (PayPal) performs payment processing for on-line merchants.